WordPress Plugins to Help Analyze Your Site for Performance Issues

Installing WordPress is a breeze. Making sure it’s optimized and plugins are working properly is an entirely different challenge. You know that your site’s speed is important, but knowing how to optimize it is much more complex. Even developers can have a hard time identifying the offending plugin. Luckily, there are a few speed plugins that can help you out. Here are four plugins you should install now if you think your WordPress site isn’t optimized.

It’s not uncommon to head over to ThemeForest and pick up a theme for your new WordPress site. Plenty of big organizations can afford customized designs, but for some site owners the cost is beyond their budget. ThemeForest has themes from $20 to $60, and there are thousands to choose from.

As most coders know, you get what you pay for, so if you don’t know how to code review a theme, then bugs and poor design can go unnoticed. Thankfully, there is Theme Check. It’s an automated way to review your theme using the same methods that the WordPress team uses to review code before it’s published to the repository.

Each new version of PHP and WordPress comes with changes to syntax. Methods, classes and properties are replaced with more efficient ones. When a coder creates a plugin, he needs to update his code before it becomes deprecated or it will no longer work.

When WordPress and PHP retire functionality, it’s first deprecated and a warning is given to the coder. These warnings can be suppressed so that users and site owners don’t see them, but you should be aware when they happen. Using Log Deprecated Notices, you can run through your plugins to find the ones that could be outdated in a future upgrade.

Using deprecated code can harm your site’s performance as well as cause issues in future WordPress releases. Either find another plugin or ask the developer if he will provide an update to support newer versions of PHP and WordPress.

Is WordPress not running like it should? How do you know if it’s a plugin, a theme, or maybe it’s just the way it’s supposed to run? With Debug Bar, you can see any errors and warnings right from the admin bar.

This plugin requires some editing of the wp-config.php file, which is located in the root directory where you install WordPress. Make sure you feel comfortable editing the file before you download the plugin.

Once you get Debug Bar configured, you can see PHP warnings and notices. Just like Log Deprecated Notices, these warnings and notices are suppressed from view, so users can’t see them. However, it can affect the performance of your site and eventually become a bigger problem. This plugin will help you avoid any major issues down the line.

Debug Bar also has an extension named Debug Bar Cron that can be used to review scheduled events and any cron jobs currently running. It’s a good extension if you have several automated events.

Every time you install a plugin, you affect the load time for your site. If you’ve ever wondered which plugins are largely affecting your site’s performance, P3 Plugin Performance Profile is for you.

The WordPress application itself is highly optimized, but WordPress does not review plugins for speed optimization. This is why you should always be careful which plugins you install on your site. P3 will give you a breakdown of which plugins could be harming your speed.

It requires the HTML5 canvas element, so make sure you have an upgraded version of your browser that supports HTML5 elements.

If you’ve done everything you can to improve your WordPress site performance, and it’s still slow, it might not be WordPress’s fault. We’ve outlined 5 Reasons Why Your Site is Too Slow.

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